The interior configuration, architecture, and illumination of airplanes has become relatively standardized today. The arrangement of passenger seats, passenger cabins, bulkheads, lavatories, serving areas, and the like have become developed for convenience and accommodation of both passengers and crew. The passenger compartments typically have sidewall members with a plurality of windows, a floor member and a ceiling member or assembly of some type. In addition, pluralities of rows of stowage or storage bins are positioned on the aircraft generally at the position between the sidewalls and the ceilings. For larger twin-aisle aircraft, rows of inboard stowage bins are also positioned over the seats located along the center of the passenger cabins.
The design, architecture, and lighting of the interiors of passenger aircraft, particularly the passenger cabins, have remained substantially the same for a long period of time and have not had a significant variety of changes or updates.
There continues to be a need in the aircraft industry for new and innovative solutions to passenger space, cabins, furnishings and illumination. There is also a need to change or vary the aesthetics of passenger cabins in order to improve the perception and aesthetics of the space, as well as possibly catering to the different moods of the passengers. This includes the use of changes in LED based mood lighting to emphasize the activities performed aboard an aircraft, such as boarding, resting, eating and the like.
The improvements described herein would be useful in an aircraft cabin cross bin illumination system such as described in co-pending patent application Ser. No. 11/553,725 filed Oct. 27, 2006, which is a continuation of Ser. No. 11/164,267 filed Nov. 16, 2006, now abandoned. Another example of cross bin illumination, using efficient beam forming optical light emitting diodes may be found in co-pending patent application Ser. No. 11/760,386 filed Jun. 8, 2007. Each of these applications are incorporated herein by reference.
A large number of illumination systems employ a wide variety of light emitting diode (LED) illumination systems. These include those with relatively simple beam forming optical surfaces, such as seen for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,083,297, 7,059,731, 6,899,443, 6,988,815, 6,896,381, 6,819,506 and 6,814,470. Other beam forming optics, with more unusual shapes, including faceted surfaces are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,042,655, 7,021,767, 7,006,306, 6,924,943, and 6,607,286. Also, simple strip light illumination systems are disclosed, for example in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,114,827, 7,063,440 and 6,609,813. All of the aforementioned U.S. patents are incorporated herein by reference.
However, none of these prior designs provide a compact illumination device combining efficient beam forming optical LEDs and prism beam turning and beam splitting arrangement for direct and indirect lighting of surfaces, as practiced in embodiments of this disclosure.